


Lost and Found

by elescritora



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 09:51:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18689089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elescritora/pseuds/elescritora
Summary: Seven awakens on a deserted island with an injured Kathryn.





	Lost and Found

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in February 2005.

_And now I’m all alone again._

_I’m the only one here. Aside from the spider monkeys and the tree snakes and the frogs and birds, I’m the only living creature on this island. The mound under the pandanus leaves by the bay tells a story that I can’t. That I won’t._

  
“Kathryn,” her voice murmured hoarsely. “Kathryn?”

Struggling to her knees in the sand, Seven looked around her, disoriented. She was on an isolated beach, wet sand under her knees and pushing up under her fingernails. She had no memory of how she got there, just a knowledge that Kathryn should be with her.

“Kathryn!”

After a brief search, Seven found Kathryn not more than a few metres away in a rock-pool. She was half-submerged and barely breathing. From the look of her body, she’d been battered against the rocks when they’d been washed ashore from … wherever they’d been.

Kathryn’s body, despite Seven’s care, gathered more than a few scrapes as it was dragged from the rocks and onto the beach. Seven was too weak to carry her and Kathryn was heavier than she looked. They spent the first night under a tree on the edge of the jungle – Kathryn unconscious, and Seven exhausted, but keeping watch for the monsters her father had once told her existed in places like this. She knew as an adult she shouldn’t believe him, but hadn’t his stories come true once? She was living proof of what happened when the monsters found you.

The next day Seven knew she had to find food. She knew she had to make shelter. Leaving Kathryn alone was not an option, so she stood in the edge of the ocean and caught fish with her left hand, the modified implant making for an acceptable short spear. She had no way of making fire to cook them, so she ate her portion raw. Breaking the fish into small pieces still didn’t make it possible for Kathryn to swallow, but she managed to get some water down. They stayed under the tree again that night.

When the morning came and Kathryn didn’t wake, Seven was starting to get worried. While she was lying in the sun, recharging her nanoprobes, she wondered what do to about the situation. She couldn’t think of anything, except to wait and see what happened. She started building a water-tight shelter from palm fronds and pandanus leaves that grew around the place they were resting. After some experimentation, she figured out a way to use her glass eye to make fire, and she had a hot meal that evening. Kathryn was able to drink some of the fish broth Seven made for her, but she still didn’t wake up.

Over the following weeks, Seven built their house. She stockpiled food and weapons, made utensils and a new liquid that provided protection from the sun, when spread on the skin. She developed a beacon to activate for when someone came searching for them. Kathryn still didn’t wake up. Seven started to consider using her nanoprobes to reanimate her, but she didn’t think Kathryn would like that. Instead, she talked to her. All of Seven’s problems, her hopes and dreams and thoughts she’d never shared with anyone, she told to Kathryn – too far gone to respond, too close by to remain distant from.

After two months, Kathryn wasn’t dying but she wasn’t living either. Seven thought she was going crazy, and she reactivated Kathryn’s systems with a dose of nano-technology. Kathryn responded wonderfully and at last she became coherent again. She remembered everything Seven had told her, and they made love in the moonlight filtering through the palm fronds, and they washed in the ocean in the dawn.

For two sweet weeks they had their happiness before it became clear that Kathryn’s body could not sustain the nanoprobes. Seven cried. Kathryn comforted her and assured her that things would be alright, even after she was gone. Seven, who remembered a time before the small freckled woman had been awake, knew differently. Her mind was not made to be alone. Kathryn stopped her before Seven could complete the plan for cortical implant transferral. After that, Seven accepted the inevitable. Kathryn was going to die – because of her.

It happened one morning, after three point three four weeks of waiting. Kathryn, her body grey and metallic, turned her bald head to look into Seven’s eyes and she blinked. Seven knew this was the signal, and she put her hand onto Kathryn’s neck. Kathryn could barely breathe and it was close to the end, so Seven helped her along. It was very quick, her tubules entering the flesh, and administering the lethal dose of technological virus. She held her Kathryn as she died, looking up at her with love and gratitude.

Then she took her to the rock-pool and she sat there for hours, rocking the body in her arms, too afraid to let it go.

  
_This funeral pyre before me is ready to be ignited. Kathryn wanted it so. To be turned to dust and to float away from this island. I wish to float away with her also. To be free of this place. It is a torment to me and so I shall be free with her._

The glass eye was removed and held between sunlight and dried foliage. It caught fire, and after Seven was sure that it was blazing well, she stepped into the flames and felt them lick up around her calves. She thought of her Kathryn and felt no more pain, just a floating, over the island out to sea, over the ship two miles away, searching for them, and into the clouds, to frolic with Kathryn forever.


End file.
